Thursday, August 07, 2008

Summer Flowers

I have sand for dirt around my house. Really---sand. Sand that you would find at the beach. There are areas near by where they dig up the sand, put it in huge trucks and sell it to places hundreds of miles away. It is not easy growing flowers in sand. It's hard to keep them watered and fed. I try to add organic matter to enrich the beds, but it is a slow process. Day lilies seem to like the sand. The main problem with day lilies is that they bloom for a short time and by the first of August they are no blooms to be seen.

Here are some of day lilies from this summer:

There are a few other flowers I can grown in the sand like this Stokes Aster.Flowers that last the summer have to be in pots in order to thrive

I have tried to grow tomatoes in pots. I have learned that putting them under the pine trees cause the tomatoes to be covered with pine sap. I've gotten a few tomatoes, but cleaning the pine sap off is interesting. We have a friend who has recently bought some land and moved her family and horses there. Perhaps she will have some extra "organic" material to share. I plan to grab a small trailer full and cover the flower beds for the winter.

3 comments:

After moving to the mountains from the coast of NC, and from sand to clay, I can commiserate. The first hurricanes to blow through Wilmington left thousands of trees and limbs to be mulched and left at the sides of the roads until the trucks could come scoop them up and take them to a spot in Brunswick County, where it was sold as mulch after a year or so. I took the horsetrailer and spent three weeks hauling it full after work, then spreading it onto areas that I wanted to plant in later. I ended up with about 50 square feet of grass to mow, and the rest turned into gardens. I layered that mulch with horse and chicken manure, lime ( as it was quite acid from the oaks )to about 1 foot thick. The neighbors laughed at my 'black yard with nothing growing in it'. We had only about 6 inches of sandy soil, with a miniscule bit of topsoil, before hitting the hardpan below. When I noticed wild plants growing in the mulch here and there, I planted daylilies, azaleas and all sorts of perennials. I also planted a sapling Sycamore. They took off, and despite the batterings from 5 more hurricanes, filled out and beautified the entire yard, leaving me with mower-wide paths of grass, and jealous neighbors! Until I moved 6 years later, I never weeded, except a bit where the grass wanted into the beds, but just gave everything a winter feeding of manure and lime once they had gone to sleep in Nov. The Sycamore is now over 80 feet tall and almost 15 inches across in the trunk, and punched through the hardpan. It was laid over completely during the last hurricane, but righted itself over the following week.What I have learned- if you have sandy soil- add mulch. Lots of it. It will change the sand into wonderful soil with earthworms galore!